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[Tysonesque rant snipped . . .] Without the church there would have been no Galileo. Even to this day Catholic schools are known for their academic excellence. [Which excellence by our lights did not exist in Galileo's time.]
Do try to stay on topic.

Whilst out on a limb speculating yourself into the pot & kettle fallacy.

I don't get this entire thread. There seems to be a hate-on for Tyson that is inexplicable to me. Is. I'm a science fan, not a scientist. The difference is very important. Tyson is attempting to convey the overall story to laymen not specific details to grad school physics students.

I want to understand why Einstein and Newton are so revered and why The Principia Mathematica and the Theory of Relativity are amazing and important. Sure, Tyson could get bogged down into the minutiae that would lose his audience (Me). But what purpose would that serve? I generally understand the subject now so Tyson did his job.

I think sometimes that skepticism ruins all the fun, in real life day to day.

Sometimes I find myself (or others do) over-analyzing things that really aren't important. Knowing when to shut up is part of being a skeptic, at least to me. Nobody wants to hang around the know-it-all at a party, for instance. Cliff Claven sydrome.

I think this picking of Tyson is mostly that. We have our skeptic hats on too tight.

About the racial thing, it never occurred to me.

I think Tyson is great. I like his approach much better than Bill Nye's. I saw Nye's new show on Netflix and I think he comes across a bit too condescending and elitist.

I find Tyson entertaining and engaging in terms of popularizing science, but I don't think of him highly as a thinker, generally speaking. At all. And some of the things stated in the OP don't surprise me.

Originally Posted by Sean Carroll

"There's a long venerable tradition of physicists. I'm a physicist. Physicist like - especially at a certain age - to look around the intellectual landscape and see other fields of inquiry that are not physics and go 'I could do that' better than they can. I'm a physicist! How hard could it be?"

I find Tyson entertaining and engaging in terms of popularizing science, but I don't think of him highly as a thinker, generally speaking. ...

What do you base that on? Just because Tyson, like Carl Sagan, moved into the field of popularizing cosmology doesn't mean he didn't earn his position. He has a doctorate in astrophysics for heaven's sake.

What do you base that on? Just because Tyson, like Carl Sagan, moved into the field of popularizing cosmology doesn't mean he didn't earn his position. He has a doctorate in astrophysics for heaven's sake.

And his work as a physicist is a red herring. Nobody is criticizing him on that basis.

This signature is intended to irradiate people.

Nope, he is not an easy target: he is not only an excellent scientist but a superb explainer of science and of the value of science to the general public. Which is what makes him a target of conservatives who find scientifically derived facts inconvenient. Evolution? Goes against fundamentalist religion. Global climate change? Goes against the Koch brothers desire to sell more coal and oil. The importance of government funded research? Goes against the simplistic ideas of purely private enterprise. etc.

And an individual questioning, or worse still, providing facts that might convince others to question the current far-right Republican agenda means that the individual must be attacked and their credibility underminded. The way to do it is by innuendo: subtly suggest, using incorrect, wrong, distorted information, that the individual is not to be trusted. Use rumors. Use hyperbola. Focus on the meaningless. Eventually, even in the absence of any proof, people will develop a subconscious buy in to these lies. "Oh Tyson? I heard you can't trust him... I don't quite remember why, but you can't. So if he says there is global climate change there probably isn't"

I've seen this applied to other prominent individuals n the past and I sense this being applied to Tyson now. This strategy works even more readily against Tyson because of the subconcious racism that cause some people to be unable to admit that a black person might be smarter than they are, and that they might actually learn a lot from that person.

Nope, he is not an easy target: he is not only an excellent scientist but a superb explainer of science and of the value of science to the general public. Which is what makes him a target of conservatives who find scientifically derived facts inconvenient. ...

I think this whole thread is just that, someone whose god beliefs are the real issue.

I think this whole thread is just that, someone whose god beliefs are the real issue.

I'm with you Ginger. It's either that or some deep seeded subconscious racism. I think Tyson is great. I have no issues with him at all. But that doesn't mean he's perfect. But then again I don't expect him or understand why anyone would else would expect him to be.

__________________“ A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume

But that doesn't mean he's perfect. But then again I don't expect him or understand why anyone would else would expect him to be.

We don't expect him to be perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't point it out when he's wrong. And recognise it when others do so.

__________________"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Isaac Asimov

We don't expect him to be perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't point it out when he's wrong. And recognise it when others do so.

There seems to be an issue of degree here. Trashing someone's entire accomplishments because they didn't note things like specifically one penguin species that lives on the equator has a few members that live in the northern hemisphere?

There seems to be an issue of degree here. Trashing someone's entire accomplishments because they didn't note things like specifically one penguin species that lives on the equator has a few members that live in the northern hemisphere?

Seriously, that's your nitpick?

Yeah, that sounds pretty silly.

I agree that sometimes people have been giving NDT a hard time about ridiculous things. Marplots' criticism of the apple analogy springs to mind (sorry marplots). I read the OP and some of the things in there seemed to be reasonable criticisms, but I also don't know how accurate it was.

I generally like NDT, but sometimes he does say things that bother me, as I mentioned I find his take on dark matter misleading.

__________________"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Isaac Asimov

I think that Skeptic Ginger and Roboramma's posts highlight a crucial point: along with them I have no problem with criticism of what NDGT says: all scientists and science presenters should be subject to this form of correction. And as does everyone, NDGT does make minor mistakes or creates some over-simplifications in explaining science to the general public. This is pretty inherent in the genre- the science presenter provides overviews of fields that are not their own that they must explain using analogies and a non-scientific vocabulary to people with little appropriate background. Criticisms of flawed examples of this tightrope walk are valid, although imo the criticisms should recognize the nature of the genre: NDGT failing to note that Golden delicious apples may have ratios of peel to overall radius that stray 2 fold from that of the earth's atmosphere to radius is severely missing the point.

However, what I note in the OP, and in much of the right wing/religious criticisms of NDGT, is not so much an attempt to debate the specific points he makes, but an attempt to undermine and demean him overall. Rather than openly and directly debate him on global climate change or on evolution, points which he would obviously win, the goal as I see it is to attack him and his legitimacy personally using distortions, nitpicking, quotes out of context, etc. That way one can undercut him as a voice revealing the dangers of climate change without ever having to debate him on climate change. One can undercut him as an advocate of evolution without ever debating him on evolution. This may sound paranoid, but I've observed this inuenda/attack the individual strategy used against others who have opposed fundamentalist or right wing agendas.

The method perfected by David Brower as head of the Sierra Club in the '60's had four basic points:

Use sweeping generalities with little or no support from empirical data.
Appeal to emotion rather than reason.
Use carefully selected, often out-of-context quotations and provide highly problematic interpretations of those quotations.
When the above does not suffice, lie.

Along with massive feely-touchy funding, Brower turned the Sierra Club into a force to be dealt with from coast to coast but he was eventually tossed by his own board of directors. Even though they "had had enough," that same technique is used by myriad groups in myriad venues to this day.

I'm not sure what NDGT does, but interestingly, I did learn that the skin of an apple is proportionately similar to the earth's atmosphere. I thought that was a marvelous fact, one to tell the children and their children too.

Astrophysics.

__________________There is no problem so great that it cannot be fixed by small explosives carefully placed.

Nope, he is not an easy target: he is not only an excellent scientist but a superb explainer of science and of the value of science to the general public. Which is what makes him a target of conservatives who find scientifically derived facts inconvenient. Evolution? Goes against fundamentalist religion. Global climate change? Goes against the Koch brothers desire to sell more coal and oil. The importance of government funded research? Goes against the simplistic ideas of purely private enterprise. etc.

And an individual questioning, or worse still, providing facts that might convince others to question the current far-right Republican agenda means that the individual must be attacked and their credibility underminded. The way to do it is by innuendo: subtly suggest, using incorrect, wrong, distorted information, that the individual is not to be trusted. Use rumors. Use hyperbola. Focus on the meaningless. Eventually, even in the absence of any proof, people will develop a subconscious buy in to these lies. "Oh Tyson? I heard you can't trust him... I don't quite remember why, but you can't. So if he says there is global climate change there probably isn't"

I've seen this applied to other prominent individuals n the past and I sense this being applied to Tyson now. This strategy works even more readily against Tyson because of the subconcious racism that cause some people to be unable to admit that a black person might be smarter than they are, and that they might actually learn a lot from that person.

NDT is a vital threat to the same narrative that Barack Obama and Jackie Robinson are/were. Counterexamples frustrating proper intolerance simply cannot be tolerated.

__________________Driftwood on an empty shore of the sea of meaninglessness. Irrelevant, weightless, inconsequential moment of existential hubris on the fast track to oblivion. Spends that time videogaming.

When Tyson tells you gravity falls exponentially with distance, he certainly isn't teaching you Newtonian mechanics. For orbits to follow the paths of conic sections, gravity needs to fall with inverse square of distance.

Really? falling with the inverse square of distance is a special case of falling exponentially with distance. There's not a damn thing wrong with that statement.

He gets people engaged in science. He gets the interest of those who were uninterested. He gets appreciation for those who do the actual work. He gets important developments into the news. He gives pedants nits to pick at. There is something for everyone. Even bad ties!

And lets be clear, I took the apple skin/atmosphere thing with a grain of salt until marplots went to the trouble to show how *********** accurate it actually is. NDGT promoting science and skepticism!

Among car guys he is oft cited for neglecting aero effect in estimating max corning speed on a race track. He was catastrophically wrong. In a tweet. It was fantastic. Everyone came out of the woodworks to explain the awesome power of aero effects on race cars and I learned a lot about stuff I thought I already knew a lot about.

Eh? Where did you get this from? If you want to defend Tyson better do it with valid arguments.

Hint: Inverse square law -> there is -2 in the exponent. Exponential -> there is x in the exponent.
This makes for a really huge difference.

But read the actual statement. Decreasing (falling) with the square of distance (which is exponential, yes?) is exactly how gravitational force behaves. That is what NDGT was pointing out. This is the same as stating the gravitational force between two objects is related to the inverse square of distance.

But read the actual statement. Decreasing (falling) with the square of distance (which is exponential, yes?) is exactly how gravitational force behaves. That is what NDGT was pointing out. This is the same as stating the gravitational force between two objects is related to the inverse square of distance.

Inverse square law is polynomial, not exponential. They behave quite differently.

I'm quite sure Tyson just misspoke. Still I find it a little bit surprising that a scientist in a field that is heavily rooted in math could confuse the two.

r-2 and -2r are very different, even though both give the same value when r = -2.

Similarly a broken clock is very different from a working one, even though it's still right twice a day.

__________________"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Isaac Asimov

You did catch a few mistakes or exaggerations, and I suggest that everything he says must be absolute witchcraft.

He is, in fact, a liability.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is clearly the enemy of rationality. Let's definitely start waging the war for critical thinking by crucifying him. I can't think of anyone else who is more responsible for compromising the coalition for reason than he is.

r-2 and -2r are very different, even though both give the same value when r = -2.

Similarly a broken clock is very different from a working one, even though it's still right twice a day.

NdGT stated (what- once, several times ?) that gravity falls off exponentially with distance, which is actually true for this special case. He did not state that the equation was itself an exponential one. I would say that he slipped too closely into the vernacular use of exponential to incorrectly include power series. Which is none the less quite common usage, particularly for when the base is 2. Relatively few among the general public would understand the distinction.

A missed learning opportunity? Yes, but I certainly doubt he as an astrophysicist lacks this understanding himself...

NdGT stated (what- once, several times ?) that gravity falls off exponentially with distance, which is actually true for this special case. He did not state that the equation was itself an exponential one. I would say that he slipped too closely into the vernacular use of exponential to incorrectly include power series. Which is none the less quite common usage, particularly for when the base is 2. Relatively few among the general public would understand the distinction.

A missed learning opportunity? Yes, but I certainly doubt he as an astrophysicist lacks this understanding himself...

And he is no broken clock.

I don't quite understand your insistence on calling the usage of exponential in this case as correct because I think it definitely is not.

You wouldn't call a parabel to grow exponentialy, would you?

Look I don't think this was a huge mistake by Tyson but it did convey a wrong picture. Celestial mechanics would look very different if gravity would fall off exponentialy with distance.

Yes, but as someone who has a bit of familiarity with math I would say they are both exponential relationships as opposed to linear. I think that is the important distinction that many lay audiences are not familiar with: as you go twice as far from a body the gravity is not just halved.

He could have been more accurate, but in simplifying for a lay audience I think he was accurate enough to make his point. If you think he was trying to misrepresent the formula for calculating gravitational forces or that he doesn't understand that formula, then I think you have a burden to support that claim.

I deal with a very narrow aspect of the law on a regular basis. How I discuss it with my friends, clients, and colleagues are three completely different vocabularies. This was also true when I was an engineer who had a fairly narrow specialty. I tend to assume it is true of most subjects. Even astrophysics.

I don't quite understand your insistence on calling the usage of exponential in this case as correct because I think it definitely is not.

You wouldn't call a parabel to grow exponentialy, would you?

Look I don't think this was a huge mistake by Tyson but it did convey a wrong picture. Celestial mechanics would look very different if gravity would fall off exponentialy with distance.

I like this argument. Yes, for those who could even form that picture in their head completely and accurately, in other words, those intimately familiar with the subject, they would be mislead by his inaccurate terminology? Surely you jest.

Tyson is a B.S. artist. Not as influential as Trump but a B.S. artist regardless. Both Trump and Tyson rose to prominence on the wave of an ignorant populace that values entertainment over rigor and accuracy.

Fareed Zakaria talks about Trump as a B.S. artist. Zakaria quotes Harry Frankfort: “Focus is panoramic rather than particular... with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the ”Bull **** artist”. Later in the clip Fareed further quotes Frankfort: “Liars and truth tellers are acutely aware of facts and truth. The B.S. artist, however, has lost all connection with reality. By virture of this, bull **** is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson will study a topic with half his attention and then build a story around it. Which is usally entertaining but often wrong. I don’t believe it’s his intention to convey misinformatiom. It comes from combining his flamboyance with sloppy scholarship. And his fantasies are often colored by his preconceptions and prejudices.

What is telling is the acceptance of Tyson’s bull. Most of Tyso’s fans are self proclaimed skeptics. But if his misinformation seems to support their prejudices, they will swallow it without scrutiny. In their own way these self proclaimed skeptics are as credulous as Trump’s birthers.

Paying lip service to skepticism is not sufficient. A true skeptic must question all assumptions whether or not they find the message pleasing.

The problem with this rant is Tyson’s ignorance on how a prognosis is delivered. A doctor doesn’t tell a patient “You got six months.” Rather a patient is given statistics. Does someone living longer than expected mean the three doctors were idiots? No. It demonstrates there are statistical outliers on a bell curve.

It is ... astonishing. Astonishing Tyson and the Physics 101 prof aren’t familiar with freshmen level statistics and probability. It is also astonishing that they think someone who flunked physics 101 would make it to med school. There are idiot physicists, I assure you.

Except for the the part Dr. Novella didn’t like. Dr. Novella evidently wasn’t paying close attention to the rest of the lecture.

Two Thousand Milligrams of Cocaine

A little further into his TAM6 lecture Tyson talks about his jury duty. He takes a judge to task for calling a quantity of cocaine two thousand milligrams. Tyson, not being aware a normal cocaine dose is 150 milligrams, seems to think two grams of coke is a trivial amount.

LSD doses are measured in micrograms. A gram is a million micrograms. Does Tyson think a gram of LSD is a small dosage?

Maybe that is how Tyson managed to conflate 9-11 with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

9-11 was a very emotional time. There was a lot of anger directed at Arabs in general. Tyson has Bush responding with a speech “attempting to distinguish we from they.” Sowing division during that time of turmoil would have been reprehensible.

But Bush’s actual speech was a call for inclusion and tolerance. Bush was exactly the opposite of the xenophobic demagogue from Tyson’s fantasy world.

It turns out Tyson conflated Bush's 9-11 speech with his eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts. Bush did quote scripture in that eulogy. But he wasn't attempting to distinguish Christians from Muslims.

The Bush and Star Names fiction was part of Tyson’s routine starting in 2006, perhaps earlier. He stopped telling this story in September of 2014 after Sean Davis ran his exposé. How on earth did the self proclaimed skeptics swallow this story for eight years without question? It is because it is an unflattering portrait of a Christian president. Just like Trump’s birthers, they are happy to accept falsehoods if it supports their prejudices.

With some arm twisting Tyson admitted the story was wrong. Not only wrong time but wrong context and wrong intent. There was no Arab baiting in Bush’s eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts.

Hamid al Ghazali Single Handedly Ended the Islamic Golden Age

About 55 minutes into his TAM6 lecture, Tyson Blames Hamid al Ghazali for ending the Islamic Golden Age. According to Tyson, Ghazali’s writings contain the statement that manipulating numbers is the work of the devil. Which is odd since Ghazali praised the disciplines of math and science saying they are necessary for a prosperous society.

Tyson will point to the 1.3 billion Muslims presently alive and ask why aren’t they getting as many Nobel prizes as the 15 million Jewish people? It’s Ghazali’s fault! Well, the people of India also number about 1.3 billion. How many people living in India have earned a Nobel prize in science? One - C. V. Raman in Physics. Citizens of China is another group of about 1.3 billion. How many Chinese have earned Nobel prizes in science? Three. About a dozen if you include Chinese people not living in China. And both India and China have also enjoyed periods of creativity in math and science. In fact it was the Indians who invented the so called Arabic decimal system, not the Arabs as Tyson falsely claims.

About 57 minutes minutes into his TAM6 talk [url=https://youtu.be/8vfOpZD4Sm8?t=3438]Tyson shows an anti Big Bang Theory bill board as an example of Christian stupidity. He seems unaware that it was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who formulated the Big Bang theory.

Tyson often nostalgically looks back to the Apollo era. But more people were going to church when we were putting men on the moon. It is hard to make rising religiosity the scapegoat for our declining competence. Religiosity has also been on the decline.

Two thousand years before Newton Eudoxus was slicing stuff into small bits to get more accurate approximations of volume and area. His methods were well known when Descartes invented analytic geometry (also known as graph paper with an x and y axis). With Descartes’ invention y=x^2 became a parabola. x^2 + y^2 = 1 became a circle with radius one. Descartes’ way of looking at things enabled us to scrutinize conic sections and other curves with symbolic algebra.

After Descartes invented analytic geometry, it was only a matter of time before someone used Eudoxus like methods to get good approximations of the slope of a curve or the area under a curve. Which was done by Fermat among others. Fermat was the father of calculus. After Fermat the discoveries of Newton were inevitable as evidenced that Leibniz made them at the same time.

After thinking he had established Newton’s super powers Tyson flatly asserts Newton could have knocked out perturbation theory in an afternoon. “You know this!” Tyson shouts to his enthusiastic audience. Well, no. I don’t. And neither does Tyson or his credulous audience.

Euler took a crack at perturbation theory and n-body mechanics. As did Lagrange. Both these men were giants in their own right but did not make satisfactory models. 100 years after Newton, Laplace built on the work of Euler, Lagrange and Newton. To say Newton could have done it in an afternoon is disrespecting Laplace, Euler and Lagrange. It is also profoundly ignorant.

In Tyson’s alternate history Newton would have easily done Laplace’s n-body work had he not been stopped by his belief in the “God of The Gaps”. Tyson states this as a flat out fact. But an alternate history is not a testable hypothesis. We can’t rewind history and see what happens with different parameters.

I’ll offer my alternate history. An agnostic Newton would have been a normal young man who spent his spare time in taverns chasing women. No splitting of light, no laws of motion, and no contributions to calculus. His accomplishments would have been zip, zero, nada. Like Tyson’s alternate history this is nothing more than idle speculation. But you won’t see me shouting the absolute certainty of this fantasy to a roomful of so called skeptics.

In Summary

On the stage of TAM6 Tyson pushed out one steaming pile after another. And his fans ate it up.

Tyson demonstrates the self proclaimed skeptics are actually credulous. The JREF folks should be deeply embarrassed.

I expect Tyson to be increasingly used as an instrument to discredit the skeptic community much like Anthony Weiner was used to discredit Democrats. He is a serious liability.

Soo..... what exactly are you saying?....

__________________"I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan"

I like this argument. Yes, for those who could even form that picture in their head completely and accurately, in other words, those intimately familiar with the subject, they would be mislead by his inaccurate terminology? Surely you jest.

So he's using the Lie-to-childrenWP method to engage with people who may otherwise switch off the "boring science stuff". What's the problem again?

__________________“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” - Charles Darwin

...like so many contemporary philosophers he especially enjoyed giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was. - Tom Lehrer

I like this argument. Yes, for those who could even form that picture in their head completely and accurately, in other words, those intimately familiar with the subject, they would be mislead by his inaccurate terminology? Surely you jest.

I guess I just don't understand you guys.

Or maybe you just don't understand the difference between a power law and an exponential law?

I mean every time we read of an exponential growth rate in the news paper (and we do from time to time, though it is quite often misapplied), it could just mean a square law, right?

And this has not much to do with a complete and accurate understanding of the underlying issues.